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On September 6, the University of Mississippi football team secured a clutch win against the Louisville Cardinals. But online discourse seems less concerned about Ole Miss’s buzzer-beater field goal, and more focused on a spectator named Sara Smith.
Smith briefly appeared in ESPN’s broadcast of the game, skin glowing, blonde hair perfectly tousled, eyes glued to the field. It was a classic “honey shot,” a colloquial term for the camera zooming in on a beautiful woman at a sporting event. Many honey shots are shown on stadium jumbotrons—others, like Smith’s, make it to live TV. In the digital age, this seconds-long spotlight is enough to generate more viral conversation than a football game ever could. Social media users quickly identified Smith as an Ole Miss alum and current master’s student at Lincoln Memorial University. Tweets praising her honey shot have earned tens of thousands of likes.
A Slate article attributes the honey shot’s creation to Andy Sidaris, a former ABC sports director. His wandering lens harkens back to the 1970s, when he first broadcast footage of cheerleaders during a football game. According to Slate, Sidaris once told Los Angeles magazine: “Once you’ve seen one huddle you’ve seen them all…So you either look at the popcorn, the guys, or the ladies. The choice is clear to me.” Throughout his career, Sidaris wasn’t shy about objectifying women. In an interview with the San Diego Union, he said that the “girls [in Buffalo] looked like plant foremen,” adding that there might be a “shortage of hairbrushes at Stanford.” Yet decades later, the honey shot is far from controversial. Rather, it’s become a staple of televised sporting events around the world, one the average viewer might never question.
Even before social media, honey shots had the potential to catapult their subjects to stardom. Playboy discovered Pamela Anderson after she appeared on a football jumbotron in 1989. More recently, a Colombian woman named Natalia Betancourt rose to fame after cameras found her at the 2014 Fifa World Cup. Her honey shot drew attention from Rihanna, who called Betancourt “Colombian cutie” in a tweet. She’s since appeared on countless men’s magazine covers and the Colombian edition of Dancing with the Stars. “I don’t think it’s offensive or objectifying,” she told the BBC in 2018. “I think in a way it’s good that it shows that football is a sport for both women and men.”
The honey shot is not a perfect path to a better life. Anderson and Betancourt have both addressed the toll of being “discovered,” a term that implies they should be grateful for attention they might not have wanted. Anderson told Harper’s Bazaar that when she first saw herself on the jumbotron, she thought she “looked old,” despite being 22 at the time. When her sex tape with Tommy Lee leaked in 1997, her career was further marked by nonconsensual use of her image. In her BBC interview, Betancourt said it was “hard to ignore” the social media hate she received after her World Cup cameo. Fifa claimed to vouch for a crackdown on honey shots in 2018, but based on this summer’s tournament, it didn’t stick.
A recent TikTok from Smith highlights the complexity of being thrown into a spotlight she didn’t ask for. In the video, she pokes fun at direct messages she’s received from men since appearing on ESPN. Some appear good-natured—like the man offering to pick her up groceries from Whole Foods, or the one begging her to “bankrupt” him—while others toe the line of dehumanizing. One can imagine that for every message Smith shared, there are dozens more that enter the realm of predatory and downright dangerous. The video’s comment section has taken on a life of its own, with users condemning Smith, who is engaged, for “disrespecting” her fiancé by posting other men’s messages.
Herein lies another paradox: In her TikTok, Smith hid the names and photos of the men who messaged her. She gave them anonymity, a privilege she herself didn’t receive when ESPN’s camera made her the focus.